Mac OS X Public Beta

For the vast majority of Mac users, the September 13, 2000 appearance of the …

The Good

I'll start by listing the features of the Mac OS X Public Beta UI that are predominantly beneficial and well designed. Nothing is without compromises, however, so I'll also list the drawbacks associated with each good feature. Each item in the list contains:

A short one-sentence description identifying the feature.

A picture illustrating the feature (optional)

A longer explanation of the feature.

A description of the benefits and drawbacks of the feature, possibly with comments about how they pertain to different types of users.

This list is not presented in any particular order, and is not meant to be exhaustive. I'm just trying to highlight some of the best features in the OS X Beta UI.

1. Everything looks nice.

Want to download the desktop background seen above? Two sizes: big and huge

Explanation:This is mostly a subjective issue, but even those that absolutely hate the look of the Aqua UI have to admit that a tremendous amount of work was put into it. You may think it's ugly, but it's certainly polished. Everything is treated as high art, from subtly pinstriped menus to crystalline buttons to photorealistic icons.The graphite look eliminates the primary non-subjective complaint about the look of the UI: the bright, contrasting colors of the blue appearance are detrimental to graphics artists. They upset the color balance of the screen and may cause the artist to create color shifts in his original work in reaction to the colors that surround it. This is a basic principle of design: colors look different depending on what colors are next them. Many artists were very upset when they saw the bright, garish look of the original blue theme, and rightfully so. Apple heard them and has fixed the problem by providing an optional appearance mode with nearly all color sucked out of it. The widgets do actually have a slight blue tint, but presumably not enough to make a visual impact.

Benefits: No one wants to look at an ugly screen all day, and Mac owners in particular are responsive to things that look polished and (wait for it...) "elegant."

Drawbacks: Pretty graphics tend to be more computationally expensive to draw. This hurts the advanced user the most since he is more likely to stress the limits of the CPU power available to him.

2. Window design makes efficient use of space.

Explanation: Aqua windows are essentially borderless. This design feature by itself is quite an eyestrain; windows tend to blend with each other as they overlap. (Try a borderless Aqua-style theme for Kaleidoscope or Windowblinds to see what I mean.) But Aqua windows are padded by a single-pixel transparent border (cropped out of the above picture because it looks odd out of context) and a larger transparent drop-shadow. These effects frame the window enough to make it distinct while still allowing items behind to show through. An extremely minimalist window border treatment is therefore possible. Many people have criticized Aqua as a "screen real estate hog," but the basic window design is quite minimalist.

Benefits: More of each window may be dedicated to displaying content, rather than UI widgetry.

Drawbacks: The lack of borders makes edge-resizing and edge-dragging impossible. Advanced users sometimes want this functionality to allow them to work more efficiently in certain window manipulation situations.

3. Sheets are a good idea.

Explanation: Sheets keep window-specific dialogs attached to their window. Dragging the window around also moves the attached sheet.

Benefits: The use of sheets helps avoid application-modal dialogs, letting the user continue to use an application while deferring decisions about a particular window in that application indefinitely. The attached nature of sheets reminds the user which window goes with which dialog.

Drawbacks: None that I can think of.

4. The "modified" dot is helpful.

Explanation: When a document has unsaved changes, a small dot appears inside the document window's close widget. This is a feature inherited from the NeXTSTEP interface.

Benefits: The dot servers as a just-in-time reminder that a document has not yet been saved. Granted, every application should pop up an "unsaved changed" dialog like the one shown in the sheets example above, but the dot is a nice passive backup reminder. It also allows the user to determine at a glance which windows have unsaved changes.

Drawbacks: Not implemented in every application yet.

5. Bundles simplify file management.

Explanation: Bundles have been explained ad nauseam in past articles. Briefly, a bundle is a folder that encapsulates many related files and appears as a single item in the high-level user interface. There are many kinds of bundles: application bundles, shared library bundles, etc. Bundles allow multiple resources of many types (languages, binary executable formats, library versions, plug-ins, etc.) to be managed via an abstracted interface that manipulates files within the bundle on behalf of the user. The image above shows the different localizations of the Clock application as they're displayed in the Finder's "inspector" window. These localized resources exist within the Clock's application bundle and may be manipulated via the UI shown above.

Benefits: There's a nice benefits list in this article. Again, briefly, bundles simplify installation, movement, and removal of complex systems of files and help avoid version and format conflicts among executables and libraries.

John Siracusa / John Siracusa has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Boston University. He has been a Mac user since 1984, a Unix geek since 1993, and is a professional web developer and freelance technology writer.